


corpus delicti

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Have a Good Relationship, Billy Hargrove Has Powers, Billy is not FULLY a dick, Brotherly Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson, Dark Magic, Harm to Children, Human Sacrifice, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Old Gods, Poor Will Byers, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Friendship, Steve Harrington Has Powers, Steve tries his best, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-01-22 11:06:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21301022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: corpus delictiLatin: "body of the crime"noun (law): the set of facts and evidence which serve as proof that a crime has taken place, such as the corpse of a murder victimStranger ThingsSatanic Things
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Will Byers & The Party
Comments: 54
Kudos: 145





	1. The Death of Will Byers

Max saw the altar waiting as soon as she opened the door and was embarrassed to say that she immediately felt more comfortable and relieved, the soft glow of the beeswax candles illuminating the herbs, stones, and feathers laid over the black cloth, hand embroidered with designs in silver, copper, and gold thread. The smell of coconut and curry filled the apartment.

To his credit, Hopper didn’t even look surprised. Then again, Max was a twelve-year-old in black eyeliner and black nail polish, and a lot of her wardrobe tended to look like she’d stolen it from Billie Eilish. She felt like her home environment was pretty clearly advertised. “It’s okay,” she said, with a weak smile, hefting her bookbag. “He’s home.”

“El ain’t going to school in the morning,” he told her quietly. “So don’t feel like you gotta go. If your brother don’t want you by yourself, Steve has the other boys spending the night at his. I’m dropping El off there tomorrow.”

“I’ll ask him,” she promised. “Thanks for the ride, Hop.”

“You’re welcome, kid.”

Slowly, like she was moving through syrup, Max set her bag down on the bench in the front hall, hung her coat on the hook, slipped her shoes off, and put them on the rack next to the door.

She didn’t feel the urge to cry until she walked to the kitchen doorway and saw Billy standing at the stove, stirring potatoes in the Massaman curry. It was Max’s favorite and that was undoubtedly why he was making it.

Her eyes began to water as she pictured Jonathan and his ashen face, sitting on an empty bed in Will’s abandoned room, where the Clash still played on repeat. Would-would Billy make that terrible face if something had happened to her?

A whimper escaped her and Billy looked over his shoulder, swore, and turned the fire off the stove.

“Mad Max…” he sighed, but there was nothing to say. No words could make it better. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed until the tears wouldn’t come anymore.

She breathed in the familiar smell of sage, heather, and ash that lingered in the complicated knots of his braids and in all of his clothes. “I don’t know why-I don’t know _why_ he did it.”

The heavy rings on his fingers felt cool, soothing, against her face.

“You want me to ask him?” he asked seriously.

Max’s face pinched. “I thought you didn’t do that. You said necromancy is dangerous.”

“I won’t bring him back or even summon his spirit to me,” Billy assured her. “I’ll just ask him a question.”

“Can you?” She sniffed and wiped her face with her sleeve.

“Yeah, Max, I can do that.” He scoffed and used a dishtowel to clean her face, wiping the snot from her nose. “We’re gonna eat some dinner and then you can have your blessing.”

“Then you’ll ask Will?”

He shook his head. “You know the rule, Max. No big spells with you in the house.”

“I know,” she muttered.

She ate her curry sitting across Billy’s lap, and they watched ‘American Horror Story: Freak Show’. They’ve watched all of them dozens of times – it’s hard for Max to be properly scared when she had Billy in her ear, explaining why all of the magic was bullshit and how ghosts didn’t behave that way.

Subconsciously, one of her hands rested on the face of the wolf inked across his chest, a habit she’d had since she was a small child and Billy had carried her away from his father’s house. He always said that Lupercalia would ward away evil and protect her. Max didn’t know how much she believed that, but she did feel better to rest her hand there – she’d probably put that down to feeling Billy’s heart thrumming beneath her fingertips, though.

After dinner, Billy went to get the oil and Max folded herself down in front of the altar, the way she had every evening for the past six years, untying the leather cord from around her neck and letting the big polished amethyst rest in front of the biggest candle at the center.

In practiced motions, Billy dipped his finger in the bowl of blessed oil and swiped it in an arch over her brows, then just a dot of the oak and holly ash between her eyes. He let her take a piece of the heavy paper. Some days, she had to sit there for several minutes, but today her hands immediately crushed the sheet between her fingers, hands shaking with the force.

“Diana, I ask you to bless this girl, a virgin in your image,” Billy began quietly, covering her hands with his own. “Please grant her clarity, strength, and joy as she walks within the circle of your protection. Release her of her worries and cleanse her of her fears.”

He lifted his hands, taking the crushed paper from her and letting the flame of the candle burn it, and all of her most negative emotions, away. After the space of a heartbeat, the amethyst stone glowed softly. Billy tied it back around Max’s neck.

Maybe it was just a light show, maybe it was just Billy going through the motions to make her feel better. But it _did_ make her feel better.

She fell asleep halfway through Freak Show and Billy carried her back to her bed, whispering into her hair as he laid her down. “I bless my daughter, Maxine Elizabeth, in my name and the names of all my ancestors. May they protect her, in the light of the day or the darkness of night. Let her suffer no harm from those ephemeral or immortal, living or dead.”

A halo briefly lit around the crown of Max’s fiery hair, his request wordlessly answered by whatever power he called upon. Billy didn’t even know – that particular blessing wasn’t written in any book, just a word-of-mouth spell passed down from his mother and her mother before her. It seemed to work, wherever it came from.

He ran his hand over the red curls, taking a little longer to pull away than he normally would.

Late this morning, Jonathan Byers had come home from an assignment in Aleppo to find his brother’s dead body. Will had hung himself from the ceiling fan in his room and he’d been long dead by the time Jonathan found him. Will’s mother Joyce was fucking hysterical, like any mother would be. She refused to believe her little boy was dead.

Billy’s stomach curdled at the mere suggestion of something like that happening to Max. He’d probably handle it even worse, to be honest. Joyce Byers didn’t have the power to make her son’s spirit return to the living world.

\---

“I don’t wanna get up,” Dustin mumbled into the pillow, making his speech even harder to understand than usual.

It was alright. Steve had lots of practice. He twisted his fingers around the riot of curls apart Dustin’s head. “You don’t have to,” he murmured. “We can spend all day in bed eating Oreos if you want.”

Steve didn’t write the rule book, but he was pretty sure if one of your best friends killed himself during your first year of middle school, you were allowed a free pass for at least a week.

Only two mornings ago, Will had been singing along to ‘Sucker’ on the radio with Steve, Robin, and Dustin while Mike scowled in the middle of the backseat.

Will had never been the loudest or even the happiest child in the bunch, but Steve could never have expected him to do something like this. He was a good boy and Steve honestly didn’t know how to process the fact that he was really gone. From the rumors Robin had gathered around town, his mother hadn’t.

Joyce Byers was vehemently insistent that her son was not dead, that the body they’d taken from Will’s bedroom wasn’t her little boy.

It made the insides of Steve’s ears itch.

(She could be right. But why…?)

“Don’t want Oreos,” Dustin muttered gloomily, letting Steve know that he really did feel like shit.

“Max and El are coming over,” he murmured, rubbing Dustin between the shoulders. “You guys could watch a movie.”

Dustin made a noncommittal noise, uncharacteristically quiet. On the sofa, Mike was laying on his back and staring up blankly at the ceiling. Mike was probably the closest to Will and he didn’t seem to be taking this much better than Will’s mother. Lucas was a silent ball of misery curled up between the couch and the coffee table.

“Okay,” he said, standing. “Okay.”

He yanked and pulled at Lucas and Dustin, knowing that Mike would follow wherever the other two went now that they’d lost their fourth member. Steve dragged them into his own room, letting them collapse on the unmade bed, arms gathering them as close to him as he could manage.

For the first time in a long, long time, he wished he could fan out his wings. Steve’s instincts were telling him that they needed to covered, protected. But with the wings came the fangs. And the talons. And the strength. And…

Yeah.

So, no wings.

“Eggos?” El asked tentatively, poking her head through the door. She pleaded at Steve with her eyes.

“Hopper didn’t have time to make you anything?” he asked, concerned.

“Wasn’t hungry before,” she answered honestly. Steve and Robin’s apartment always smelled really good and it woke up the appetite she hadn’t been able to manage at home.

Steve left them in a cuddle pile on his bed and followed El out to the kitchen for frozen waffles.

“Mmm, something smells really good,” Max said, coming in through the door behind Robin.

El blinked. “We haven’t started cooking yet.”

“It’s Steve,” Robin teased. “That animal magnetism.”

Steve blushed and scowled at her and both of the girls giggled, though El was nice enough to say “Aw, we should be nice to Steve.”

He leaned over to kiss her forehead. “Good girl, at least one of you isn’t here just to make me miserable.”

She smiled angelically. “Who will make my Eggos if you get mad at me?”

He groaned, and they laughed at him again, and it was almost normal until El gave a little hiccup in the middle of her laugh and then the laughter abruptly became tears. “Oh baby,” Robin cooed, folding her into a hug. “Poor baby.”

They were ushered back to Steve’s room with a plate of Eggos and a tray of hot chocolate. The whole bed was silent until El suddenly said “I dreamed him, last night.”

“Yeah?” Max said. According to her brother, who Max insisted was A Real Witch, dreams were guides for the future. Her black fingernails pinched the little mug. “What happened?”

El frowned, feeling a little more reluctant to talk about this now. “He wanted me to get up from the bed. To follow him,” she said, and Steve’s stomach dropped to the floor. “He was really scared. Sorry, none of it really made any sense.” 

\---

Across town, Billy was discovering what Steve Harrington already suspected.

“William Byers, I ask you to confide in me,” he whispered, speaking into the smoke of the incense and sage, touching the silver medallion at his neck. “Why did you take your own life, boy?”

And a little boy’s voice, timid and frightened, answered him, much clearer than any spirit’s should be.

_I-I don’t know how I got here. Who are you?_

“My name is Billy. Where are you, Will?” he asked, gentling his voice to the murmur of Max’s childhood nightmares, when he’d first taken her away from Susan and Neil’s house. “Can you tell me where you are?”

_All I can see are the stairs. It’s really dark. I-I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t like that other voice. But it won’t let me leave. Please…can you help me_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this became unexpectedly emotional - I lost one of my best friends to a car accident in junior year of high school, and a lot of those emotions came back when I was writing about the Party dealing with Will's death.


	2. The Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "At least you're not an angel."
> 
> Steve snorted. "Yeah, nobody's gonna be mistaking me for an angel."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Max might low-key have a crush on El in this fic, but they're twelve, so I ain't worrying about that! There is a significantly larger age-gap between the ST 'teens' and the ST 'kids' group, but I did that on purpose.
> 
> Also: dear satan, please do not expect the rest of this to be uploaded so quickly.

Robin let him get the kids calm, get them all squashed onto his bed with Netflix on, playing ‘the Great British Bakeoff’ – tasty, relaxing, and absolutely no chance of discussions about dead bodies or suicide. 

“Uh, I don’t mean to be a nosy bitch-”

“-which you are-”

‘-but didn’t you get anything to eat?” Robin asked, brows raised to tell him that she was definitely not talking about Eggos and hot chocolate.

Steve quickly looked down at his hands, still soft, with brittle chewed-down fingernails. “What? Yeah! I’m full, Rob!”

“Okay, I was just wondering why you suddenly started wafting your bakery voodoo all over the house, dingus,” Robin said calmly. “Cause the _down to fuck_ vibes are coming out real strong right now. That doesn’t usually happen unless you’re hungry and trying to get someone to…feed you.”

He waved a hand vaguely and sheepishly said “Stress. Sorry.”

“Maybe you should have something extra,” she said, frowning.

“What, like dessert?” he asked skeptically. Steve was…on a diet. For lack of a better term. Generally, he only ate enough to satisfy his cravings and never gorged himself on more than he needed. He didn’t like indulging that part of his nature.

She shrugged. “Like…comfort food. Steve-Eggos. Steve-cocoa.”

“I don’t really have a favorite,” he said, amused despite himself. “Doesn’t really work like that. At least, not for me.”

She raised her brows and called his bullshit. “Nancy.”

Steve shook his head and wriggled his toes in their fuzzy shoes. “That’s…that was different, Rob. I was in love with Nancy. It wasn’t something about her in particular, it was the way I felt about her that made me enjoy it more.”

She crossed her arms and leaned against the counter. “You love me. Not like Nancy, but you know you love me.”

Disturbed, he said “You aren’t seriously offering to-?”

“Not the whole nine yards,” she assured him quickly. “But, y’know – the part with your clothes still on. I can do that.” Robin lifted the purple studded collar from her neck, flashing the pulse beating beneath her skin.

The roof of Steve’s mouth itched, the way it normally did when he saw a hot person walk by – only this time, without the boner he usually started to sport. “C’mon,” she coaxed, apparently able to correctly interpret his dumb-founded expression. “It’s 100% home-grown doofus. The perfect junk food for a dingus.”

His eyes darted around the room, landing on his own bedroom door. “Not out here.”

One of the least convenient features of his…anatomy…was that Steve couldn’t just manifest a singular aspect of his other body. If he brought out his fangs, the rest of him would soon follow and that would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain away. Fangs out, Steve just stood in the middle of Robin’s room and kind of restlessly fluttered his wings.

Robin knew basically everything there was to know about him, claws and all, but this was a line they’d never crossed.

She was eyeing him rather critically, watching his nervous behavior. “For god’s sake,” she muttered, and held her arms out for a hug. “You’ve done this like a hundred times, Steve. Just open your mouth and bite.”

He embraced her gently, mindful of the dramatic increase in strength this body gave him. “They were always like…out of it,” he mumbled, inhaling the salty-sweet smell of caramel and toffee she seemed to exude. “Didn’t want them to see the…extra parts, so I never bit them until I’d fucked their brains out.”

She laughed quietly and it stirred his dark hair. “Okay, himbo.”

After a moment of serious silence, he said “Feel the pain or numb it away?”

In there was a third option, the default setting, but Robin didn’t want that and Steve wasn’t going to offer.

“Numb,” she said, idly stroking the top edge of one enormous wing.

Steve prodded the gland in the roof of his mouth with his tongue, pausing a moment to let it coat his teeth with the special fluid that would numb Robin’s nerves as his fangs pierced the skin. He hesitated and she started petting his hair, sitting very calm and still.

Robin’s blood was fresh taffy and long days in the sun. Sharing cups of salted caramel ice cream floated over iced espresso. Banana Boat sunscreen and Robin’s hand in his, pulling him along with her – it didn’t really matter where, he’d follow her anywhere she went. Young and laughing, at the edge of childhood and adulthood where anything was possible and everything took too long to happen.

“Oh,” he whispered and hugged her close, pressing his tongue to the wound so that it would stop bleeding. _Steve-Eggos_. _Comfort food for a dingus_. His voice broke. “I’m gonna miss him, Rob.”

He realized Robin was crying. “He was so little,” she whispered, cheek pressed to Steve’s hair. “He was so little and now he’s-he’s-”

He gave into his earlier urge and mantled himself around her, wings sweeping inward. Covering them, for just a few moments, in an artificial darkness.

\---

Billy honestly had no fucking clue what he was hoping to accomplish with a stunt like this. At the very least, if worst came to worst, he could say that he’d offered his condolences the way one was supposed to in moments like these.

Jonathan answered the door. His eyes were red, blood vessels shot from continuous crying. Billy had met Jonathan before, sort of in passing, and he was a dude that never looked like he got enough sunlight to begin with – but now his skin had turned a sickly looking waxy yellow color.

He had just gotten back from a trip in Aleppo as a war correspondent. He’d probably seen every horrible thing he could’ve possibly imagined. But Jonathan Byers now had the look of a man who’d gone beyond that. He’d seen something _worse_ than his most terrible imagining.

“Um, hi,” he muttered, without lifting his head to meet Billy’s eyes. His shoulders were hunched inwards, like he was on the verge of curling up and dying himself. He’d fucking better not – Billy didn’t care if Will was dead or not, if Jonathan made their mother bury both of them, Billy had no problem giving him a beating he’d never forget.

“Hey, Byers. Is your mom home?”

“Yeah, she…” Jonathan stopped, fingers brushing the doorjamb. Somewhere distantly in the house behind him, a radio was playing.

_So c’mon and let me know…should I stay or should I go_?

“Mom…” he called, half-pleading, nearly in tears again. “I don’t wanna hear it anymore. I don’t wanna hear it ever again.”

Joyce Byers voice looked and sounded like the human equivalent of a wrung-out towel. “I didn’t touch it, honey. I promise.”

Her hair was stringy and unwashed and while Billy was certain that her makeup had been neatly done yesterday, it was a smeared and faded mess left on her face. Her eyes were vague as she lifted them to rest on Billy. “Hello, Mrs. Byers. I’m-”

“Billy, Max’s brother,” she acknowledged dully. “The man who screamed at the vice principal during the Snow Ball.”

“Er…”

Bryce Taylor had spent most of the dance flipping up the skirt of any girl too distracted to keep an eye on him. This process ended with Max, who after having her underwear revealed to half of her class, turned around and socked him in the face so hard she busted his nose. The vice principal had threatened to expel Max, since she’d injured a classmate and had been fighting during a school event and he’d barely even acknowledged Bryce’s behavior.

Which was when Billy had lost it right outside the gym doors. _“And what the fuck was she supposed to do, huh?! How the fuck was she supposed to be defending herself, when every adult in that room was pretending they couldn’t see that little bastard terrorizing every girl in the fifth grade. Expel her? Fucking _EXPEL HER_?! You’ll be lucky if I don’t press charges on him and this fucking school – you watched him assault her and nobody lifted ONE FUCKING FINGER!! You ain’t gonna be expelling her, but I sure as hell am gonna call a fucking journalist tonight.” _

The board of education fired him.

“Yeah, that was me,” Billy admitted, without guilt.

“Max gushes about you all the time,” she murmured, with a heroic effort at politeness. “You have the same eyes.”

He didn’t correct her, didn’t remind her that he and Max weren’t actually related. That stopped mattering to him years ago, when his bastard father married a woman who already had a toddler and was just desperate enough to marry a man over ten years her senior. Susan had an opiate addiction within the first year of their marriage and Billy didn’t blame her for that – he knew first hand that Neil Hargrove broke people, but he had to hold his tongue about how often he was the one getting up to make Max breakfast and giving her a bath, and as soon as he was skilled enough to bewitch a social worker, he took her the fuck out of there and never once looked back.

Instead, he said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Byers. I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.”

Her eyes slowly filled up with tears that refused to fall. “They say that he killed himself. Jonathan…found him in his room…but…but…” Fresh trails spilled down her cheeks. “That isn’t his body. That’s not Will’s body. And I don’t know where he went…”

And Billy, instead of telling her that maybe she should lie down, quietly asked “Why do you think that, Joyce?”

She touched a spot near her elbow. “My Will has a birthmark, right here. But that body they showed me…it doesn’t have one.”

“That is very strange,” Billy agreed evenly, knowing that Joyce couldn’t possibly tell how fast his heart had begun beating.

How had they done it – whoever ‘they’ were? A simple illusion for a cruel prank wouldn’t have been able to hold up to touching or any kind of interaction, no matter how brief. It had to be black magic, it _had_ to be. There was no good or innocent reason to make an Effigy. It was more common centuries ago, when human sacrifice was still a big thing.

That kind of offering was the realm of the Old Ones, though. Most of them had been banished by newer gods, and those that remained were abandoned in the era of science and technology and positive energy witchcraft.

So who wanted the whole town of Hawkins to believe that Will Byers was dead?

He left Joyce with a mojo hidden underneath the cushions of the coach. A small sachet of cloth that resembled a teabag, Billy’s mojo should make Joyce feel a little calmer and a little less sad and, if she happened to fall asleep on the sofa, her dreams would be sweeter and her sleep more restful.

_Please, I miss my mom. I don’t like it here, Billy. _

\---

Steve chauffeured the nerd-herd over to the Wheeler’s house. There was no one home anyway and as nice as the apartment his father’s money paid for was, no two-bedroom apartment was really designed to hold seven people at once. He let them get settled into the basement before Robin called him about a styling appointment in two days.

El waited until he was out of the room before she turned the sound on the television down and whispered, “I’m not sure that Will is really dead.”

“El,” Lucas sighed quietly, leaning against the wall. He looked exhausted – Steve’s air mattress was comfortable but he’d barely gotten longer than an hour at a time last night. Mike had spent the whole night crying, on and off, and Dustin was so quiet that it scared him. “Jonathan…found him.”

“When I dreamed about him…there was something I didn’t tell you,” she admitted. “It sounds really crazy…”

Max squeezed her hand. Now that she had grown up a little, she had realized that ‘really crazy’ was sort of her bread and butter. She’d had exactly one sleep over back when they lived in Dayton, but Mrs. Yarborough hadn’t given Max a blessing at bedtime and the sheets didn’t smell of lemon and peppermint the way her bed at home did, and the house was too quiet. Their apartment was often filled with murmuring when Billy consulted with whatever power his spells were created by. “We can deal with crazy. Just tell us, El.”

“It wasn’t really a dream,” El confessed finally, rubbing at the shiny black film over Max’s nails.

A little too loudly, Dustin said “But you said…”

“Shh!” Max and Mike both hissed.

“I know,” El allowed. “But it isn’t really like dreaming. It’s more like…I fall asleep in my bed, in my room, and when I wake up, my body is still in the bed, still sleeping, but I’m not. I’m somewhere else.”

“Spirit-walking!” Max said, excited. “El, you could be a Witch, like Billy!”

“So you’ve done this before?” Lucas asked skeptically.

“Well…once. I don’t do it on purpose, it just…happens,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “Um. You know, about why I live with Jim?”

The story of how El had come to be adopted by the Hawkins Chief of Police was something straight out of a Hallmark movie drama. Hopper had elected to spend the holidays out in the woods in his grandfather’s hunting cabin when and after arriving late to the cabin on Christmas Eve, found a little girl of around seven or eight shivering on his front porch. She wore shoes that were one size too small, a dress two sizes too big, and no coat, hat, or gloves to protect her from the light snowfall.

She also had no name and no memory, absolutely nothing. Hopper hadn’t been able to find her tracks within the snow. It was as though she’s just appeared, fully formed out of thin air, and landed straight on his porch. He ended up calling her ‘Eleven’, because the only identifiable piece of information on her had been ‘011’ written in sharpie on the back collar of her dress, and that had quickly been softened into the affectionate ‘El’.

“The night I found Jim, I dreamed of a place…where there were woods, but the trees…spoke. And it was night there, all the time,” El said slowly. “There was a woman there, and she was the one who led me to the cabin. She said that I wasn’t to leave, that I had to wait for the man to come find me. I went back to that place last night, and when I was there, there was no woman but I did see Will.”

“You said he looked scared, and he wanted you to go with him.” Dustin said urgently. “Why didn’t you go with him? You could’ve helped him!”

“She did the right thing,” Max whispered, hands clasped together tightly in her lap. Her lips were pinched together and the freckles on her nose stood out sharply against her pale skin. “She absolutely did the right thing. Forget what I said – El, you’re not a Witch. I think you’re a _Faerie_.”

“You cannot be serious,” Mike said flatly, pain and anger filling his face. “Cut the new age Wicca bullshit, Max. This is serious.”

“I am being serious!” she insisted harshly, lifting off her haunches a little. “We have to tell my brother! Billy can help us!”

Lucas made a face. He didn’t want to tell Max that her brother was a dick, but- “Max your brother is kind of an asshole.”

She scowled. “You’re just mad that he laughed when your robot fighter for the competition exploded.”

“Yes,” Dustin said. “But he really is an asshole.”

\---

Against every sensible instinct Billy had in him, he drove to the Marion County morgue and after sitting in the Camaro for nearly an hour, got up and Charmed the desk clerk into letting him into the back storage rooms.

He had to know what level of magic he was dealing with here – it could be a simple construct with Will Byers face placed over it. It could be a wicker man or a corn child. _All Ancestors, let it not be a corn child_.

If the fake body was a corn child, then someone in Hawkins had likely kidnapped Will Byers and covered their crime with the Effigy, and would probably attempt to sacrifice him in exchange for something from a third party. Billy would not only have to find the mage who did it, and hopefully stop them from killing Will for real, but he’d also have to deal with whatever demon they were bargaining with.

Shit, he wished he’d thought to bring a Devil’s Trap. A proper Trap, with the bowl inscribed with verses of the big threes – the Torah, the Quran, and the bible. Fuck, he didn’t even think he could buy one, he’d have to make it himself. All he had with him was a witch ball. Well, at least he’d know if something entered the morgue with him. The green glass of the ball would glow if it caught something – and if it was too powerful, the ball would shatter.

As soon as Billy opened the drawer, he swore under his breath. It wasn’t a simple construct with an illusion of Will Byers placed over it. Taking the dirk from his belt, Billy took a breath and sliced a large cut into the forearm. Horror filled his face as he yanked the skin open and revealed, rather than muscle and bone, a sludge made of mud, clay and, if the potent iron smell was an indication, _blood_. “You’re a golem.”

\---

The familiar rumble out on the street made Steve look up from his phone. “Max!” he called. “Your brother is here!”

“Okay!”

He bit back a groan of irritation as someone pounded twice on the front door, instead getting up to answer it. _Asshole_.

Steve didn’t particularly like Billy Hargrove. Previously, he’d always kept his distance from him. Something about the man just…rubbed him the wrong way.

_Which was a pity_, Steve thought, opening the door for the man. Because he was easily one of the best looking men he’d ever met.

Most men couldn't pull off the rings, tattoos, piercings and braided hair, but Billy didn’t just pull it off, he made the witch-type-aesthetic seem downright sexy. But the man was – “Looking good today, pretty boy” – a _huge_ asshole.

“Hargrove,” he acknowledged with a grunt, resisting the urge to scowl when that made Billy grin.

The kids thundered up the stairs, looking guilty about something. “Uh, we need to talk to you about something,” Dustin told Steve, without quite meeting his eyes. Max told her brother “Billy, too. I wanna talk you.”

Jesus, if this was some sort of blind date set up, Steve was gonna _die_. He glanced at Billy. No, he decided, first he was gonna ride Hargrove until he went cross-eyed. If the dickhead really pissed him off, Steve consoled himself that he could leave Billy a drooling idiot for the rest of his life.

In hindsight, part of the problem was that Steve had avoided Billy as much as humanly possible. Never spent any amount of time in close quarters near him. The other part of the problem was that Steve couldn’t keep his mouth shut even when it was good for him.

As they waited for one of the children to start explaining themselves, Steve leaned against the kitchen table and watched Billy make himself a coffee with the Wheeler’s Keurig, because he was, it could not be overstated, a huge asshole.

The eyes of the wolf tattooed between Hargrove’s pecs seemed to be staring at him, with a gaze as eerie as its owner. The bones in his long blond braids were singing low, whispering songs, ancient tongues of the sand and sea. Steve wondered if Billy could actually hear them or if someone had sold him beads made of bone as a joke. He glanced at the black symbols inked over Billy’s knuckles, designs of alchemy and old ruins. No, he was certain Billy knew they were real, and he heard the song of the deep seas. He might be more Witch than aesthetic after all.

His eyes seemed bluer than before - like quicksilver, almost - as they stared at each other and the words emerged before Steve could snatch them back. “You aren’t really a human, are you?”

Billy cocked his hip against the counter and grinned at him, tilting his chin up to openly study him. “What about you, pretty boy? Whatcha got hiding underneath that pretty face?”

Steve tried to keep the line of his shoulders relaxed, but he could tell from the way Billy’s grin suddenly matched the wide jaws of the wolf that he hadn’t been as successful as he hoped. “My face is my face, Hargrove,” he said flatly. “Try not to cream your pants.” 

“Oh, you’re a _terrible _liar. No, no, no,” he crooned, tilting his head. Around his neck, the silver medallion he wore spun wildly, chiming a tune that set Steve’s teeth on edge. “You’re wearing an Illusion spell - no!” he corrected, delighted with himself. “You’ve _Transfigured _yourself!” 

For the first time, Dustin looked at Steve with uncertainty in his eyes and it was making him feel sick. “Steve…what’s he talking about?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Steve said sharply, squeezing the back of Dustin’s neck reassuringly. He could smash that smug grin right off Billy Hargrove’s face - even now his own blood sang a song of how easily he could destroy him…if Steve would give in.

**_Tear, bleed, fuck, feast_**.

Max popped her gum with a sassy expression. “Are you calling my brother a liar?!” 

“No, he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he said, unable to quite stop himself from imitating her bratty tone, despite being twice her age. 

“Oh, come on, Harrington,” Billy said, amused. “It can’t be that bad. I doubt you’re part mountain troll. You don’t stink enough. Take off the mask, it ain’t Halloween anymore.” 

"For you? Every day is Halloween, apparently,” he answered coolly, turning away from him with a dismissive flicker of his eyelids.

Billy snarled at the implied dismissal, quicksilver eyes gleaming mercury-bright. Lowly, he said “I can show you Halloween, you snotty little twat.”

Steve turned in time to see the five glowing yellow points on the fingertips of his left hand. With those glowing fingertips, he pulled at the air between them, like Billy was tugging on a leash. 

And Steve was at the other end. 

**_Tear, bleed, fuck, feast_**.

Mrs. Wheeler’s fruit bowl spilled all over the floor and the tablecloth as Steve stumbled backward to crash into the dining room table. Fire blazed along his shoulder blades and Steve groaned in pain. “Stop!” Dustin pleaded, sounding close to tears. “_Stop_, you’re hurting him!” 

Each of his knuckles burned and the wood of the table screeched as Steve blindly reached to hang onto the edge with hands that suddenly had thick claws in place of nails. When the pain begin radiating through his jaws, his shoulders tightening up, Steve roared “**_DON’T_**!”

And his vocal chords reaching a pitch that made Billy’s face look triumphant. He could feel the sharp edges of his own teeth, trying to fill his mouth with daggers. He cried out, struggling to find his voice in a human range, “Not in front of them! Don’t hurt the kids, you _fucking_ idiot!” 

He’s never hurt someone without meaning to before, but he wasn’t willing to bet their lives on that record, either. Especially when Hargrove already made him want to kill something.

The burning pain in his back and jaws began receding and Steve glared balefully down at the claws at the ends of his hands. Sounding almost stunned, Hargrove asked “What the fuck are you, Harrington?” 

Steve raised his eyes, wondering if they were still dark brown. “None of your **_goddamn business_**.” He bared his fangs, feeling like a fucking monster when he saw the children all cower against the kitchen cabinets out of the corner of his eye. “I’m not _Transfigured_, you arrogant asshole. I’m _Dormant_. And don’t **_ever _**fucking do that again.”

He whirled and stormed away from the house, his guts churning with uneasy terror. He’d never, not in a million years, ever planned to tell any of the children what he really was. Not even Dustin. For one thing, they didn’t need to know, because it was never going to be relevant for them. Whatever you could call his powers – dubious ‘gifts’, maybe – he had no intention of ever using them on or even _near_ the kids. There was never any question of that, and no feeding, not ever, not even the tiny taste he’d taken from Robin.

Whatever the fuck Hargrove had done to him, Steve couldn’t quite manage to force his monstrous aspects to recede. Luckily, he managed to hold it back until he could lock himself in the apartment and hide in the bathroom, which was where Robin found him an hour later, after texting her a whole explanation of the Hargrove Incident.

“Oh my god, dingus,” she said, exasperated, dropping her purse onto the hallway carpet. “You need grooming so bad.”

“It isn’t that bad, is it?”

Steve hardly needed to ask - the look on Robin’s face spoke volumes. He tried to crane his neck, staring over his shoulders. They were wings. They just looked like wings, to him. Big feathers everywhere. How else were they supposed to look? 

“What I don’t understand,” Robin said finally, “Is how someone who spent that much time on his _hair _in high school can take such shitty care of themselves.”

“You’re the only one who knows,” he pointed out. “It’s not like I can just go out and find a recommendation for a good groomer the way I can search for a decent barber.” 

“You only let me do it once a year,” she said, beginning to gently pluck at the secondaries closer to his spine. He flinched reflexively, the thick talons at the ends of his fingers scratching at the porcelain of the toilet tank. The feathers rustled at the movement, Steve not quite as calm and relaxed as he was trying to pretend. 

She couldn’t see his face, but she knew what Steve sounded like when he was sulking. “Don’t like taking them out,” he grumbles, shifting his shoulders. “They’re too heavy.” 

“How can they be too heavy, dingus, you’re _supposed_ to have them.” She knew the answer, though. They were heavy because Steve refused to let himself get used to them. As far as she knew, he only released them when Robin pestered him about taking care of them. 

A peculiar scent wafted up from the dark feathers and it grew stronger the more she ruffled and plucked at them. It was like vanilla, sweet and rich, and something else, something heady and musky. Like an animal that stalked through the night whose fur would be velvety to the touch, despite its sharp teeth. It was an enticing smell, a lure meant to draw prey closer - Robin found it pleasant enough, but the scent didn’t do much for her and it never would.

Steve made a distracted attempt at scratching himself and Robin slapped his hand away. “Keep your hands away from them, you’ll just rip them out and leave yourself bleeding!” 

She’d learned that from painful experience. Left to his own devices, Steve just scratched and yanked until the itching was gone, which would result in a sad collection of bleeding and bent up feathers that were almost heartbreaking to look at. It drove Robin so crazy that she ended up grooming them herself. 

“At least you’re not an angel,” she murmured, using careful fingers to pull at the white spikes of his pin feathers buried with the dark fluff. She’d learned what to do from watching videos of parrots on YouTube. “If they were white, this would be a real pain in the ass.” 

Steve snorted and tapped one of his talons on the lid of the toilet tank, making a ringing sound that echoed around them. “Yeah, nobody’s gonna be mistaking me for an angel, Rob.” 

“You’ve got the face for it,” she said with a smirk. “_Pretty boy_.”

“Oh my god,” he moaned, folding his arms over the porcelain and burying his face in them. “Did you just quote Billy Hargrove? He makes my teeth itch!” 

“Why?” she teased. “Does he make you wanna sink your fangs into him? Among other body parts?”

He hissed through those extended fangs, one fiery eye peering at her over his shoulder. “He makes me wanna fly him up to the Eiffel Tower - so that I can _push him_ off it.” 

She ruffled his feathers fondly. “I always knew you were a romantic, dingus.” She combed through them, trying not to snap any. “You’re attracted to him, don’t try to lie to me.” 

“I’m not _completely _led by my dick,” he said, more sharp and defensive than he really should be. “He could’ve gotten one of the kids killed with his stupid fucking magic tricks. Including his own sister.” 

“You wouldn’t have hurt them,” she said, certain and soothing.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done,” he said. Steve scrubbed at his hair anxiously, trying to keep his claws away from his own fragile skin. “You shoulda seen their faces, Rob, they were so scared. Of _me_.” 

“They were probably just in shock, Steve.” She squeezed his shoulder. “You look like an ordinary, garden variety dingus most of the time. There’s no way they could’ve expected there to be some…uh, extra about you.”

Steve glared at the porcelain. “Billy fucking Hargrove – he wouldn’t even tell me what he was, you know? And then whatever he did…felt like he was trying to drag the demon part out of me, Rob.” He shook himself and repeated “I don’t know what I would’ve done. It felt like I didn’t have any control of myself. I’ve never been that afraid of The Rousing in my life.”

Robin’s mouth twisted into an unhappy shape. Steve wouldn’t confront Billy – he was embarrassed, ashamed to have revealed the monster that lived beneath his human skin. But she had some fucking words for Billy Hargrove.


	3. The Monster

“What-what was that?” Max asked her brother shakily, the first child to break the stunned silence in the Wheeler house. “Billy, what was Steve turning into?”

“He wasn’t ‘turning into’ that, Max. He’s-he’s always been that. You just couldn’t see it before.” Billy said, a bit wooden with his own surprise. Harrington’s mouth, filled with rows of sharp teeth – like a shark, behind his rose colored lips. A danger hidden beneath temptation. “And I’m not sure about exactly what kind he is, but Steve is a demon, Max.”

“_You. Are. An. Asshole_,” Dustin said lowly, glaring at him from beneath his mop of curls. Billy found it sort of impossible to take him seriously – Henderson look like an English bulldog puppy with a poodle’s hair.

Also, the swearing of children never failed to amuse him, something that had made many of Max’s teachers despair. “I’m an asshole?” he asked incredulously. “Do you even know what he could’ve done to you, Henderson? Children are almost always a demon’s favorite food.”

Even Wheeler, miserable little sourpuss that he was, looked stricken by that. “Steve wouldn’t eat us!”

“You aren’t really disproving my asshole theory!” Dustin snarled. “We were perfectly safe before you did that! Steve would never have hurt any of us, but you _did_ hurt Steve! Fuck you and fuck your stupid magic!”

He tried to storm out the same way Steve had and Billy caught him by the arm, no longer amused. “No, you aren’t leaving the house,” he said, voice infused with a commanding tone that made the hair on the backs of their necks raise up. “None of you are going anywhere by yourselves right now.”

“Why?” Lucas asked teetering somewhere between curious and insolent.

“Because your friend Will didn’t kill himself – someone took him.”

“I _told_ you!” Max told them, gesturing excitedly. “I told you he could help us!”

Billy’s eyes narrowed. “Max, what are you talking about?”

“El’s a Faerie!” Max blurted out, even as El tried to get her to hush up, nervously eyeing Billy. “She saw Will in a dream last night and he tried to lead her away into the Nether!”

El backed away from Billy when he tried to step closer to her. After witnessing what happened to Steve, she wasn’t exactly eager to get near Max’s brother. He crouched in front of her, watching El avoid his gaze. “Tell me…what color my eyes are, Eleven.”

“Mister Hargrove, they’re bl…” She looked into his face and her mouth dropped open. “Oh my god.”

“Close, but no cigar,” Billy said, eyebrows lifting expressively. He took the witch ball from his pocket, cradling the green glass carefully between his palms.

“What? What happened?” Mike asked anxiously, and Lucas shifted around uneasily, like he wanted to get between her and Billy.

They were such an adorable lot of shitheads. He’d find them more adorable if they kept their mouths shut more often.

“They look like clouds,” El breathed, mesmerized. “The sky. In your eyes.”

“Yeah, that’s where they came from,” he said, gently putting her hands around the witch ball. “Alright, El. I want you to focus hard for me, for just a second. No, don’t look down – keep looking at my eyes, and I want you to think, as hard as you can, about making the light in that ball turn on.”

“Uh, okay,” she said uncertainly.

“Remember, eyes on me.”

Before the witch ball even flickered, Billy could see the hazy mist appear in her brown eyes – spindly trees and starry distant sky, always hovering in twilight, where the sun never rose or set. Where there was no sun, period.

The witch ball glowed, and all the lights in the Wheeler’s house suddenly surged to life, brilliant and blinding. Quickly, Billy snatched the ball from her fingers before the glass could burst from the force of her powers. He rested a hand on the top of El’s head, tilting her face up to hold her eyes. “You aren’t a Faerie,” he told her quietly. “But you’ve been to their world, to the Nether. For long enough that it’s got a hold on you, now. I can see it in your eyes.”

“What’s the Nether?” she asked, frightened.

“Hm? It’s where the Fey Folk come from. Sometimes, it’s called Never Never Land. Or the Otherworld. Or Wonderland. Humans have a lot of different names for it.”

Max piped up. “How can El have been to the Nether if she isn’t really a Faerie?”

“Well…do you remember how I told you about Changeling children?” Billy asked.

She made a face. “You said that they don’t exist,” she said accusingly. “That was the Mundane way of explaining birth defects and things – blame it on Faeries stealing their ‘real’ baby.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he allowed, with the hint of a smile. “But Changelings do exist, sometimes. Sometimes…a parent will trade their child to the Fey Folk, in exchange for a favor. Or sometimes, the Fey will make a bargain with them and trick the parent into giving their child away. Especially if the child is special.”

“My…my real parents?” El asked, wide-eyed, the shimmer of the veiled Nether beginning to fade from her gaze.

“Yeah,” Billy said softly. “I think you were a very special baby, El. And I’m not sure that your parents realized that. If the Fey wanted you, they would’ve gotten you whether your parents agreed to the trade or not. You don’t remember where you were, before you came to Hawkins, do you?”

“No,” she admitted.  
  


“I think you were in the Nether. And I think it’s…changed you, a little.”

“What do you mean by that?” Mike demanded.

“I mean that Eleven isn’t a Faerie, but she’s no longer what she was before the Fey took her.” He shrugged. “I have no idea what that makes her now.” El looked so disturbed that he gave her a small smile. “You aren’t dangerous or anything. You’re just not…ordinary, El.”

Still feeling alarmed by this new knowledge, El asked him “What did you mean, about seeing the Nether, in my eyes?”

“Folk of the other realms can’t disguise what they are, not from each other – it marks a mark on you, when you aren’t of this world.” The children all gaped at him. Billy shrugged again. “It’s the truth. Did you see Harrington’s eyes? How there was fire in them, for a few seconds? It’s how I know that he’s a demon, even if I can’t tell what kind. Hell makes a _big_ mark.”

“Oh,” Max said, crestfallen. “Is that why Steve’s house always smells like that?”

“Smells like what?” he demanded, standing to his full height.

“It’s really nice,” Eleven assured him, oblivious to the fact that Billy looked in no way comforted by this news. “It smells like…like Eggos and whipped cream!”

“Like sugar cookies,” Max added, and Mike actually nodded along with her.

“Like ice cream and sprinkles,” Lucas said, face pinching with sadness.

“Like home,” Dustin whispered, face hidden in his hands, devastated all over again. “He always smells like _home_.”

“Where’s Harrington’s jacket?” Billy demanded. They all stared at him blankly. “C’mon, Rugrats, it’s November! He came in with a jacket, where is it?”

Terrified, Mike pointed at green bomber draped over one of the kitchen chairs and Billy yanked the garment off and held it to his nose. “Ew,” Lucas muttered. “_Dude_.”

“_Shit_,” Billy whispered, light-headed from the blood rushing away from his brain and toward his dick. He had to resist the urge to adjust himself in front of them. His skin was prickling with the force of his abrupt arousal.

Cookies and ice cream, his ass. That was pure sex dipped in vanilla, a thick brown sugar-like sweetness combined delectably with the musk of a sweaty sex-soaked male, and it went straight to Billy’s head. He realized suddenly that he was salivating with an almost painful intensity and all he wanted to do was taste that skin and see if Harrington was as delicious as he smelled.

Steve was an Incubus.

There was _no way_ he was letting a group of children keep being watched by a fucking _Incubus_. Billy was a full-grown Witch with over a decade of experience under his belt and he wanted him so bad he could hardly stay standing upright – a hormone-ridden teenager would never have a prayer of resisting that.

All Ancestors, he’s been letting an _Incubus_ babysit Max for over a year and never noticed that Harrington was…well, no, Billy didn’t _want_ to see it, did he? He could barely stand looking at him. Because looking straight at him had been like sandpaper on Billy’s skin. Harrington was pretty – he hadn’t wanted to notice that either, but he couldn’t stop himself from noticing.

He was everything Billy knew he’d never have – he _couldn’t_ have. A kind, pretty boy with a normal life and a normal job. A normal childhood, with normal friends, and a normal place in the normal world.

Billy couldn’t do that, couldn’t have that. He couldn’t _be_ that. Ever since he was small, he could never be anything but what he was. As a little boy, after his mother had died, he’d tried to play at normal to avoid catching a beating from Neil, but he was never any good at pretending.

Now it seemed that it was all a lie – Harrington was never any more normal than Billy was. He was just better at hiding than Billy.

Mike muttered “Oh my god, he’s back.”

He was staring out the window, and sure enough, there was Harrington’s SUV, a brand new red BMW that looked more fitting for a suburban trophy wife than a young hairstylist in a small town, parallel parking out on the street. Inexplicably his stomach dropped, and then dropped again when instead of Harrington, his roommate, his little lesbian friend, got out of the passenger’s side, the wind whipping her short blond hair around her face.

She didn’t even knock on the front door – Robin stormed right into the Wheeler’s house and got target-locked on Billy in the first thirty seconds. She marched right up and shoved him, hard, right in the chest.

“Asshole!” she hissed, shoving him again. “_Dickhead_! C’mon, Hargrove – you don’t have any magic tricks for me?! Or do you only attack defenseless people trying to mind their own fucking business? I cheat on my taxes and I have a half-sister in Connecticut my dad thinks I don’t know about – I’m sure you can drag some other super personal secrets from me!”

“Jesus Christ, Buckley – demons are not people, get a fucking grip on yourself!” he snapped. Billy caught her hand before she could slap him across the face. She _smelled_ like Harrington, whiffs of sex and vanilla coming off her. He narrowed his eyes at her, trying to judge whether or not she was under the influence of an enchantment. “Buckley, has he actually been _feeding_ off of you?! Shit, I’m gonna have to deal with him…”

“_Deal_ with him?” Robin repeated incredulously. “Exactly what do you plan to do with Steve?”

“If I can’t Exorcise him back to Hell, then I’ll have to kill him,” Billy said, rubbing one of the rings on his hand – the one with the Seal of Solomon. “I can’t just let an Incubus roam around town, seducing and feeding off of people and leaving him alone with my own fucking sister.”

Robin stared at him in total disbelief for several seconds. “Have you lost your whole mind, Hargrove?”

“Buckley, I know he can make it feel like the attraction is real. But you’re a lesbian, and I’m not going to keep letting him do this to people,” he told her, jaw tightening. Ma always said it was a Witch’s responsibility to protect folk of the Mundane from getting hurt.

“Oh, wow. I am so sorry that I actually defended you to him,” she said finally, looking absolutely disgusted with Billy. “You really ARE a huge asshole. You think you’re gonna…what? _Save me_ from him? I’ve known what Steve Harrington is for a decade, Hargrove, and you’ve known for five fucking minutes! Don’t pretend that you know who he is or what he’s like!”

“He might be your friend, Buckley, but he’s dangerous,” Billy said softly. “And after a decade, I think you know that.”

“He _could_ be dangerous. _Anybody_ could be dangerous,” Robin said, waving her arms wildly. “And I know that he’s never done whatever sinister thing you’re thinking about – to me OR to anyone else.”

“You’re seriously expecting me to believe that you’ve been sharing an apartment with an Incubus and Harrington’s never once fed from you?” he asked, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“Nope, he’s never even asked. He has enough willing partners, he doesn’t need to convince anyone unwilling.” That was half-true anyway – the kids didn’t need to hear that Steve drank blood. That Steve had drank _her_ blood. Helpfully, she added “And it’s insulting to call him an Incubus, by the way.”

“Oh!” Mike said, in a tone of realization. “_That’s_ why Nancy thought he was a hoe!”

Lucas and Max burst into laughter before they could stop themselves, and El’s eyes suddenly looked even more enormous and round than usual. Dustin just looked supremely uncomfortable.

Looking almost amused, Billy lifted a pair of condescending brows at her. “Oh? Do tell, Buckley. What should I call the infernal sex-demon?”

“The real full-blooded Incubi and Succubi are bigoted about these things – they don’t like to be associated with half-humans and you could get Steve in trouble, calling him that.” She sniffed. “They prefer to be called ‘Cambions’. It’s more gender-neutral, anyway.”

Billy’s eyes widened briefly. Steve had a seduction power that strong – and he was only _half_ a demon?

“Can we see his demon-thing again?” Dustin piped up eagerly.

Robin’s gaze warmed to him, and Billy snapped “Absolutely the fuck not! Your friend was kidnapped, and I’m not about to let you wander around town with an Inc- a _Cambion_!”

She looked unimpressed with his hysterics. “You do realize that they’ve been ‘wandering around town with a Cambion’ for about…uh, four years now, right?” Then she blinked. “Uh, kidnapped?”

He could see her eyes scan over the kids, see her mentally reminding herself that Will was gone. “He isn’t dead, his mother was right.” Billy said tiredly. “I just looked at his body in the Marion County morgue. It’s not a child’s body – it’s a golem made of clay and blood with the skin placed over it to look like Will Byers. Someone kidnapped Will, and I thought it might be Harrington, but since you’re all so fucking sure he’s a golden boy, then I…”

Billy trailed off midsentence. To create a golem was one of the oldest black magicks alive. It’s literally been around longer than the written word. “Stupid fucking _hicks_,” he snarled, “Don’t know what they’re doing!!”

He stormed out the house and went straight to the driver’s side of the Beemer, yanking the door open. “HOW LONG?!” he roared, grabbing (the very human-seeming) Harrington and slamming him into the car. “HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN TAKING THEM?!!”

Robin and the children’s mouths all dropped open when Steve answered “Forever. Before the town – maybe before _time_ – existed, He was there.”

Billy threw him a little harder into the vehicle before waving at Harrington. “There you have it – your King, ladies and gentlemen! The children of this town have been sacrificed to the Old One, for thousands of years, and he’s never lifted a finger. Long live the fucking King!”

“Thousands of-exactly how old do you think I am?!” Steve demanded incredulously.

“You’re at least partially immortal,” Billy said dismissively. “I have no way of knowing how old you are.”

“I’m _your_ age, dickhead! Twenty-six! The last time this happened, I was only fourteen – I didn’t even know until after the fact!” he spat. “And don’t you think I _TRIED_ to stop it from taking someone else?! Do you think I _wanted_ another child to die?!!” Pressing his palms into his eyes, Steve said “I tried to get Him take me.”

Billy snorted and Robin snarled “You think that’s fucking funny?!”

He gestured to Steve’s whole being. “You a virgin, Harrington? Pure of body, untouched by human desire?” He scoffed when Steve stared at the ground, stone-faced and hard eyed. “The Old Ones were picky about that sort of thing – you can’t give a god used goods.”

Steve glared. “Thanks for the slut-shame, Hargrove. Really, thanks, I appreciate all of the support.”

“Did you know?” They both turned to Mike, whose lips were trembling. “Did you know that-that It wanted Will?”

Steve’s face softened. “No, Mike. I wasn’t even sure that Will was the one chosen until now. He tends to select someone…younger. And He’s never chosen a special child until now.”

The children stared before Mike spoke up again, face wrinkled up in concern. “…special?”

Steve nodded absently. “I’m not surprised that Mrs. Byers could see through the spells – it’s why I don’t understand what made Him pick Will. She’s probably the hardest mother in town to fool.”

“Special?” El repeated, a bit more hysterically.

He blinked. “Well, yeah. The whole Byers family is descended from a Faerie woman. I think her name was something like Tillie – no, _Tilia_, that’s it.”

Max cried “_HA_!” and turned to El. “That’s how he found you!”

And Steve said “What?” in an alarmed tone, drowned out by Billy’s sudden burst of motion as he began to pace the street.

Billy whispered “Oh, shit, that’s not good.” Restlessly tugged at the end of one of the braids that had drifted over his shoulder, he said “_Fuck, _no wonder He tried to lure in Eleven. Harrington, He didn’t pick Byers because He was looking for a sacrifice - not this time. He wanted Byers because He was looking for a fucking _Host_.”

Steve blanched and abruptly stood to his full height like a soldier standing to attention. Robin glanced between them. “Somebody wanna explain to the rest of us what that means?”

“Uh…” Steve said blankly. “I think that means we’ve reached The End Times, Rob.”


	4. The Flea and the Acrobat

“Uh…I think that means we’ve reached The End Times, Rob.” Before Robin could ask him to explain himself – because that sentence _really_ deserved some fucking clarification – Steve spoke again: “We really shouldn’t be talking about this here.”

For once, Billy agreed with him. “No, we shouldn’t.”

Steve glanced at Robin. “We need to go back to my house, I think.”

Well that leant some weight to this ‘end of the world’ talk. Her eyes widened. “You said you’d never go back to your dad’s.”

He shook his head. “I still don’t want to, but I need to check something in the private library. Let’s go.”

He was speaking to the kids – presumably every kid except Max, anyway – and Billy said “Fuck no” even as Dustin and Mike moved in Steve and Robin’s direction.

“You do realize that you can’t physically stop them from going with me? You can’t just hold them against their will – they have permission to be with me, not with you. And even if I was planning to take them to some kind of debauched orgy, they’re kids – they wouldn’t do me any good. I don’t feel like I need to say this, but kids don’t emit any ‘outer’ energy for me to feed on.” His eyes flicked over Billy’s form. “If either of us should be suspicious, it should be me. I still don’t know what the hell you are, but your powers are strong enough to force me out of a dormant state against my will – no human Witch could do that.”

Eleven, silently watching with her solemn gaze, spoke up. “He’s an Angel.”

In Billy’s eyes were the gray-purple of storm clouds, the airy blue of the skies, and a haunting silvery light that El had never seen before, may never see again in her lifetime, but she knew it instinctively. If Steve’s true gaze carried the fires of Hell, then Billy’s contained the light of Heaven.

He was an Angel – she would swear her life on it.

Steve’s expression began transforming from aggression and irritation to amusement. “Oh, that would explain why you’re such a douchebag,” he drawled. “I didn’t think you’d buy into the whole ‘mortal enemies, battle of good versus evil’ storyline, Hargrove. Or whatever they call you up there, because an Angel’s name sure as Heaven ain’t Billy Hargrove.”

“Billy,” Max said uncertainly, looking uneasily from Steve to her brother. It seemed impossible, that Billy was anything other than the man who’d raised, a precarious balance somewhere between father and older brother. “Is that-is that true?”

Billy rolled his eyes. “My name is Billy Hargrove, you drama queen. I’ve never been anywhere close to Heaven and I couldn’t go there even if I wanted to. How would I get there? I don’t have _wings_, idiot. The Angel I’m descended from fucked off generations ago, I don’t even know what their name was.” He narrowed his eyes at Steve. “But Ma used to tell me that it was our family’s job to protect regular humans from other things like you. Like _us_.”

Robin gave him a weird look. “That’s pretty fucked up. I think that’s what they call internalized racism, Hargrove. Wow.”

Huffing, Steve said “The point is, if they want to come with me, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“You can’t stop me from following you.” The wolf tattoo’s gaze seemed to view him more intensely than ever before. “I take my responsibilities seriously, Harrington.”

“Fine, whatever, I don’t care what you do,” Steve said impatiently. “But we need to _hurry up_. And for fuck’s sake, whatever you do, stay right behind me.”

Billy sneered and gestured in front of him. He knew all about the horrible things that could happen to someone trying to walk down – or drive on – a Hidden Path. He’d be riding Harrington’s ass all the way. “Lead the way, Harrington.”

Steve took the boys, Billy took the girls, and as soon as Steve and Robin closed the front doors, Dustin lisped quietly. “Steve. Friends don’t lie.”

The Cambion sighed softly. “It’s not exactly easy to explain, Dust. Especially to a really little kid like you were. And I’m a lot safer – you’re a lot safer, everybody in this town is a lot safer – if nobody knows about this world.”

“What do you mean by that?” Lucas butted in bluntly. Then, to Robin: “You seem to know a lot about this already.”

“Don’t interrogate Robbie,” Steve muttered, desperately wishing for a cigarette. Robin was looking at him – not accusing, just steadily staring at him with her large somber eyes and that was almost worse, in a way. They both knew that Steve was telling them…well, at best it was half a truth, and at the worst, something akin to a very strategic white lie.

But Rob also understood that it wasn’t the place and definitely not the time to be handing out hard truths to a group of terrified and anxious twelve-year-olds.

She said, “I read lots of weird books in high school, and I started developing theories about why my best friend was literally making people walk into walls. Steve wasn’t as good at controlling his natural magnetism back then.”

Steve snorted, glancing into the rearview to make sure that Hargrove was actually following him the way he needed to be. He did that _one time_, honestly, when he was first trying to figure out how to not starve to death or accidentally enslave two-thirds of the junior and senior classes to his desperate will to survive and have to clean up that resulting mess.

Robin was still gazing at him, silent and solemn. They’d never intended to tell the kids, but now that they knew what he was, Steve would have to finish telling them the rest of it. But not now. They deserved to be told the way he’d told Robin.

He would take them to Elysium, the only plane of Hell the Cambion had not been banished from. It was a beautiful place, with the largest brightest moon she’d ever seen and thousands of stars blazing in the perpetual twilight of the skies there. As far as the eye could see, there was a splendid field of blooming flowers. There, Steve could let them touch and whisper to those flowers, and marvel at the beauty of the moon and stars. And there, Steve would lay down with them in the long soft grass and explain that one day, he would dwell there in that moonlit garden, forever beneath that eternal night.

And when, like her, they cried, he would be there to hold them.

\---

In the other car, another eerily similar conversation was happening.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you were an Angel?” Max demanded. Many times, privately, she’d acknowledged that Billy was her own personal angel, but she’s never attached the _literal_ meaning to that thought.

Billy sighed, longing for a cigarette. “Because it wasn’t relevant, Max. I told you – I don’t have wings, I’ve never seen Heaven, I have no idea how far back my Angel blood goes. Except for my eyes, my necklace, and a few family tricks, I’d think the whole story was nothing but a legend passed down from word-of-mouth.”

“Is that why you can do magic?”

“I don’t know. Probably,” he said, uncomfortable. How much of him was Angelic by nature was not an idea he spent a lot of time thinking about. Mostly because Billy knew he’d spent most of his earlier life being the least Angelic person one could be.

It seemed as though Steve and Billy had been born to the incorrect parents, since everybody in town seemed to think that Steve Harrington was made of golden light and walked on water and the only person who’d ever seemed to think his worthless hide was capable of goodness was Maxine.

He rolled his eyes to himself as he followed Harrington down the ramp onto the highway, leading toward Indianapolis. Buckley, telling him he had _internalized racism_, like that even made any sense. Ma told him that they were Angels, fallen to earth with the monsters, to protect ordinary defenseless humans from monsters much more scary and dangerous then themselves.

He’d tried to follow her instructions, mostly because he’d never met another person like himself, never known another Witch with powers like his own. It felt like there was no one else who could do the things he did.

Max screeched as he revved the engine, cutting off someone else in traffic to whip right behind the BMW. In the backseat, El looked like a black cat on Halloween, clinging to the handle above the door. Behind them, multiple cars honked angrily, and Billy flipped them off. Max shrieked “_Why are you driving like a maniac_?!”

“Harrington is taking us through a Hidden Path, and if I don’t stay on him the whole way, we could end up lost in place like the Nether,” he explained, ignoring more honking horns as he switched lanes without a turn signal. “In the _forever_ sense, Maxine.”

“Oh,” she said weakly, clinging to the door as El was. “Then why are we following him?”

“Because Billy thinks that saving people is his responsibility,” El said, and Billy glanced at her through the visor. She looked disturbed at her own pronouncement. “How did I know that?”

Billy clicked his tongue. “Because you recently connected with me on metaphysical plane. Seems we’ve got a little psychic on our hands.”

Eleven looked like all of this information was starting to break her brain a little.

The BMW and the Camaro turned down a long well-paved road, surrounded by trees. To their left, the sun had already mostly gone down. Billy muttered “Here we go.”

Max’s phone, a basic smartphone with limited access, chimed at her. “Robin says ‘Don’t get lost’,” she said, glancing at her brother. “And ‘don’t stop’.”

In the backseat, El gasped, shrinking down in her seat, her little face white as she looked out the window and into the night. Among the trees were shifting, eerie shapes with glowing smoking eye sockets and skeletal faces. Shuddering hard, Max gripped Billy’s shoulder, reaching out to El with her other hand.

Billy chanted something lowly under his breath, and a halo of golden light appeared over Max’s head, making El’s eyes go wide and lighting up the interior of the vehicle. Several of the nearest creatures hissed and fled to escape its glare. “Billy, what were those? What did you do?”

“It’s a Blessing,” he said grimly, and Max could actually hear the capital ‘b’ in the sentence. That was nothing like the nightly ritual to Diana that Billy gave her. “We’re here.”

The BMW was pulling up to a house – closer to a mansion, honestly – set in a circular driveway at the end of the paved road, back amongst the trees. As soon as the BMW stopped and parked in the circle, multiple lights in the interior of the house switched on simultaneously.

Max muttered “That’s not unsettling at all, nope…”

Billy parked the Camaro in beside him. “Stay in the car. Text Robin and ask if we can get out now.”

“Yeah, she says it’s okay,” Max said, after a moment’s pause.

Harrington was waiting at the front door by the time they exited the vehicle, the boys trailing after him like ducklings. The girls saw Steve’s face, normally so warm and friendly, looking very serious and stern. Even Robin looked more solemn than usual. “I am going to open the door,” he said quietly. “And then there are only three rules – no talking, no touching, and definitely don’t say anyone’s name out loud.” Flicking his eyes toward Billy, he added “Stay in back where you can see them all. Make sure none of them break the rules.”

“What happens if we break the rules?” Lucas asked nervously.

“Nothing,” Steve said, to their visible surprise. “But I don’t want my father to know I brought humans here, and if you touch something or speak out loud, he’ll know. If you say anyone’s name out loud, he’ll know exactly who you are, and that’s the last thing I want. C’mon.”

_Mansion_ was an even more accurate description from the house’s interior. Steve held the door open to the front hallway, a monstrous creation of red Italian marble, only closing it when Billy came inside at the rear of the pack as instructed, before returning to the group and gesturing them down the hall with him. He led them through a literal indoor pool, out the back patio and over a man-made pond filled with rushes and reeds, toward a smaller building that looked like it could be a poolhouse if it weren’t two stories tall and held shut by a pair of heavy wooden doors. When they reached these doors, Steve held you a hand to the wood and murmured “Stephanos intrat.”

“Grata, princeps,” the disembodied voice of a lady murmured back, and the heavy wooden doors swung open.

Dustin looked extremely betrayed to learn that Steve apparently knew Latin and had never shared this fact with them, either. Steve shepherded all seven of them through before shutting the doors behind them. Most of the children said “Woah!”

The smaller two-story building was practically floor-to-ceiling books, apart from a couple of small alcoves and a large fireplace, where there was also a seating area. Shelves near the door had books only as large as Billy’s hand, and books on either side of the fireplace were nearly as tall as the kids.

“Okay,” Steve said, and everyone seemed to let out a sigh of relief. “You can talk and you can touch things but DO NOT grab any books unless you recognize the alphabet their title is written in – _especially_ Hargrove. I have no idea what some of these will do to a non-demon, but I doubt it’s awesome to look at, and it’s probably worse for someone with Angelic properties.”

Grabbing one of the rolling ladders, Steve started moving toward the back of the room. “What are we looking for?” Mike asked, head tilted back as he examined the ceiling-high book and watched him climb the ladder and flip through some of the older looking volumes. “How is this going to help us rescue Will?”

“_We_ are not looking for anything,” Steve said, just this side of curt. “I am going to check some references and see if I can find anything that describes the end of the world and what it will take to stop it.”

Billy snorted and said “Wheeler, I can guarantee that you won’t be able to read anything in this library anyway.”

“Well, some of it he could probably read,” Steve said distractedly, snapping a book closed and reaching for another. Hastily, he added “But nothing I’d show a twelve-year-old.”

“What do you mean?” Max asked, curiously peering around. “Oh! Steve, is that you with your mom?”

There was a small portrait in one of the alcoves with a Steve around her own age standing beside a woman with his deep chocolate brown eyes and even darker hair, almost blue-black. Dustin squinted at it. “Yeah,” he said, just as Steve said “No.”

Dustin froze. “What-what do you mean? I’ve met your mom, she’s nice!”

Having revealed the core of his secret life, Steve has already made the decision not to lie about the trappings around that secret. He will probably never get another better opportunity to tell him. Steve replied, “My biological mother is a human, and I’ve never met her, Dust.”

Hurt, Dustin said “Then who was the woman you said was your mom?!”

“That’s my Aunt Lilit. She raised me – she basically is my mom, y’know?” Steve looked really, really uncomfortable, and maybe that’s why he choose to jump down the ladder and go over to the shelf with the child-sized book volumes.

He frowned at shelves before selecting one wrapped a soft tan hide. A man his size shouldn’t be able to lift a book half his weight, but he had no problem with it. The only one not wide-eyed was Robin, but she looked disturbed for another reason. “Steve,” she said in a strange voice. “Please tell me that’s bound in pigskin.”

He let out a hollow laugh. “I can lie, if you want.”

“Oh god,” she said under her breath.

“What is it?” Mike asked. He and the other kids were eagerly trying to see without actually touching it.

“Human,” Billy grunted in disgust. “It’s been bound in human skin and probably written in human blood.”

All five of the kids yelped and backed away from it quickly.

“Blood mixed with ivory black,” Steve corrected, almost absently, setting the cursed book on what most of the children had assumed to be a music stand. “Maybe don’t look directly at the pages – like I said, I have no idea what this will do to anyone who isn’t a demon.”

“So you’re looking for a prophecy?” Robin asked, standing next to him and leaning on his shoulder slightly. Because Rob had a bit of a risk taker’s streak in her, she looked down at the letters it was written in the strange characters used by the denizens of hell. She couldn’t look at it for very long, of course. Staring at demonic writing gave her an uneasy prickling at the back of her neck. It made her feel like she was being watched by an invisible force with less than pure intentions. She couldn’t handle it for longer than thirty seconds.

“Mhm,” he agreed, distracted by his reading.

The kids, probably not surprisingly, get bored and start asking Billy questions about magic and Witches.

“Can you learn to be a Witch?” Lucas asked, pondering what he would do if he could perform spells. Magic made the wrist rocket look pretty lame.

Mike and Dustin perked up at this, but were quickly disappointed by Billy’s answer.

“No,” he said immediately. “You are or you aren’t.”

Standing in this room, near these objects, was starting to make Billy feel sort of…hunted. Like there was something here that could sniff out the Other in him.

“Am I?” Eleven asked, uneasy for a completely different reason.

“All women are Witches,” Billy said with a smirk. “Even if just a little.”

“Don’t bring your bullshit misogyny over here, Hargrove,” Robin said, scowling.

“I’m not, Buckley,” he said, holding up a finger. “First principal of Witchcraft: creation. Women are the center of creation for all human life. Ergo, all women are little Witches.”

“So what about transwomen, huh?” she asked defiantly.

“Every trans person is a little Witch, too. Second principal of Witchcraft: transformation. Just because they don’t do big magic like I do, doesn’t mean they can’t do magic at all.”

Robin noticed then that Steve had been too quiet and still for too long. He was frowning hard down at his unholy book.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t understand what this says,” he said, with an oblique gesture at the page.

Robin’s brows bounced upwards. “Like…literally? Is it in code or something?”

“No, it’s not in code.” Steve pushed his hair out of his eyes with a restless hand. “Prophecies are always written in these twisty riddles and I have no idea what this thing is talking about. Parts of it are something like I expected – _at the dawning of the last year, blah blah blah_, but other parts I can’t understand.”

“Seers – especially really good Seers – are almost always out of their minds,” Billy agreed in a neutral tone. “So most of their predictions only make sense to them. What does it say? Don’t paraphrase, tell me word for word.”

“_In the dawning of year zero, the Deep One shall come from_…” Steve’s face screwed up. “This is where it starts getting weird. I understand the characters, but I don’t understand _why_ they would write it this way – right here there are characters in front of this series for ‘place’ and ‘Hell’, which I would usually write if I’m trying to reference a specific plane in Hell, but I’ve never heard of this plane before. I think it says, ‘from the Upside Down’.”

_“…the Deep One shall come from the Upside Down. He shall come to cleanse the parasites_ – they mean humans, probably, maybe even all life in general – _and all shall become_…they do this again. They’re combining the characters for ‘Earth’, the planet not the element, ‘upside down’ and then they’ve added on ‘place’ and ‘Hell’.”

Hesitantly, Robin said “Do you think that means that this…Deep One…thing…will bring his plane – the Upside Down – to Earth?”

Jaw set, Billy said “Sounds to me like the Deep One plans to make Earth his new plane of Hell.”

“Well, that…definitely sounds end-of-the-world-esque,” Robin said with mock cheer.

Steve tutted, scanning the page. “_A child taken from the wood for His own shall Host him, shall_…uh, I think that’s ‘unleash’. Oh, that should be a proper noun. _A child stolen from The Wood to be his own shall Host him, shall unleash him, and on the tenth day_…ugh.” He paused to make a face, before continuing “_On the tenth day, shall stand upon the bones of his Children to open the…Gate_.”

“The Stairs,” Billy whispered. Steve glanced at him, and realized that his skin, tanned from a life spent in California sun and later a refusal to wear shirts no matter the weather, was nearly the color of snow. “Christ, It kept the bodies.”

“What are you talking about, Billy?” Max asked uncertainly.

“For the few minutes I spoke to him, Will said he didn’t know where he was, but the only thing he could see were The Stairs. All those children It ate before now, all the fucking bodies this dumb hick town dumped into Its jaws. It kept them all and It’s using them to build a staircase out of Its prison and into our world.” Max had never seen him so overwhelmed and shocked. “Centuries of all that pain and terror, built on the literal bones of dead kids...It’s amazing this town didn’t sink into Hell years ago like Atlantis or Babylon.”

Though so blasé about the book made of human skin, blood, and charred bone, Steve’s eyes flickered with pain. He had no idea if, in the unlikely event that they could stop all of this, Will could be removed from Him and still live. “_Should He gaze upon_…god, this is fucking weird…” He looked up and said “_Though should He gaze upon Michael’s daughter, the Gate shall remain closed, and Heaven’s light shine upon the_-the…rose? It’s a specific flower, but Demonic language doesn’t really care about that, so I’m just going to say ‘rose’.”

Lucas raised his eyebrows and glanced at Mike. With a smirk, he said “You have something to tell us, buddy?”

“You can’t be serious,” Mike said flatly. “Get real!”

“It would never be that easy,” Billy scoffed. “_Should He gaze upon Michael’s daughter_…”

His eyes drifted slowly to Eleven. El didn’t know the name of her biological father. It seemed unlikely that she was capable of stopping the end of the world or somehow defeating a literal Hell-god, but Billy had to admit that he didn’t actually know what El was really capable of. Was it possible that was the real reason It had tried to lure El to It? Perhaps It was trying to eliminate her as a threat before she could view Its physical form.

“I think we’ve already got Michael’s daughter with us.”

Robin and Steve looked surprised, naturally, so El had to explain what happened at the Wheeler’s before they arrived.

“Huh,” Steve said thoughtfully. “No wonder the Fae decided to take you under their wing.”

“What?”

“Bad things tend to happen to young kids who have special powers, especially when they’re surrounded by ordinary humans. The Fae were probably concerned about what your future would look like.” With a startled blink, he added “Huh. Hopper has to be good as gold, for them to have trusted him with you.”

Steve made the wise decision to leave out the part of the prophecy where he dies. It just seemed like kind of a downer.


	5. Trick or Treat, Freak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, Mom got COVID because we're both essential workers and now i'm locked inside my room on the worst vacation ever so i might as well do something useful! 2020, WHEEE!!!

“Steve,” Dustin asked quietly. “If…if we can’t save Will…”

“We are going to save Will,” Mike said, voice filled with quiet determination.

“If we don’t,” Dustin ploughed on determinedly, “If we can’t-can’t save Will on time…what-what happens…”

Robin knew from the stunned and uncomfortable expression on his face that Steve had not expected that question from his favorite child, and the topic of life after death was not an easy one for him. “Dustin…”

“He’s gonna go to heaven, kid,” Billy sighed, leaning against one of the shelves with arms folded across his chest.

Max chewed her lips and looked up at him with large blue eyes. “But…Billy, you said that the…Old One wants Will to be his Host.”

“Will is a child,” Steve said quietly. “And he has a child’s soul. So even if he dies tomorrow, that soul would go to heaven. Nothing He can do will change that, Max. It’s the same for the rest of you.”

“Could you take us there?” Dustin said, a bit desperately, eyes wet. “If we can’t save Will-”

“-we  _ are going to _ save Will!”

“-can you take us up there?” Dustin swallowed. “Just long enough to…to say goodbye. You can-you can fly, right?”

Steve held his gaze, looking more grave than Dustin had ever seen. His face was tight, almost devastated, but his voice became even softer and gentler for him. “Yes, I can fly,” he said finally. “And no, I can’t do that. They don’t let demons go to heaven, love.”

“W-what do you mean?” Dustin asked shakily.

Frowning, Max said “But you’ll die one day, won’t you? Where does your soul go? Or do demons live forever? Are you going to live forever, Steve?”

Robin suddenly turned and appeared fascinated with the books on the shelves, careful not to touch any, knowing that if she had to look directly at Steve, she was going to start crying and  _ now was still not the time for this _ .

“Demons don’t have souls, Maxine,” Billy replied, with surprising gentleness. “They don’t go anywhere – when a demon dies, that’s the end of his life.”

“They  _ do _ have souls,” Steve said, archly. “But your brother is right, Max. Demons are sort of the opposite of humans. Human souls are immortal, eternal, even if their bodies are very fragile. Demon bodies are functionally immortal, but their souls vanish when their body dies. There is no afterlife. The end is just…the end.”

Steve kept talking, hoping that if his mouth didn’t stop moving, nobody else would notice that Robin looked like  _ she _ was dying, there and then. Nobody knew that grief-stricken expression quite as well as he did, so he didn’t think the children had noticed yet. “…but I’m only a half demon, so I sort of get both. Anyway, we should get out of here. My father doesn’t usually have houseguests, but unless Lilit’s come to visit, you wouldn’t want to meet one.”

“And your prophecy?” Billy asked, brow raised.

“I wrote the English translation!” Steve objected.  _ Minus the bit where I die somewhere in there _ . “Or the parts that actually translate into English, anyway.”

As soon as they went out into the garden, Steve could tell that something was different now. 

“Stop,” he hissed, throwing an arm in front of the children at the front of the pack – Lucas and El this time. Beside him, Robin froze. Billy was still at the back of their little group, watching warily. 

The trouble with attempting to sneak around a half-breed like Steve was that like most Cambion, he made his way through the world of humans – so demonic energies which disturbed the mortal world were always readily apparent. 

His nose curled as he caught a faint stench lingering in the air – like old beer and rotting fruit. 

“Imps,” he whispered. 

“Huh?”

A loud collective shriek of terror went up as something flew out of the dark shadows of trees and flowers, latching onto the nearest target.

Robin.

Mindlessly, Steve tore through the energy separating his human and demonic selves, claws outstretched and black wings bursting out from his back, steam hissing from his nostrils and mouth at his raised temperature. A whole fucking pack of them, too, just swarming over her.

Steve surged with forward, everything around him disappeared except Robbie and a wordless roar of rage left him. The wild call to destroy and maim overcome his more human sensibilities and then it was the imps who shrieked and screamed as he tore them to pieces, breaking backs in one swipe of a hand and shredding at their leathery skin with his claws. 

“ ** _HEAR ME VERMIN_ ** !” he roared, forked tongue hissing out on the demonic syllables. “ ** _YOU TOUCH NO HUMAN OF MINE_ ** !!”

“ _ Prince _ ,” one of the larger (and craftier) imps managed to squeal out in English. “We did not recognize you, Lord Prince! We are most sorry!”

Steve bared his rows and rows of jagged teeth, flame-flickering eyes narrowed. “You will be vermin!” 

“We were sent for the girl, Prince!” It squealed, wailing in agony and as he snarled and pulled at its wings. “The Unholy Choirs –  _ heeeeeeeek _ !! – the Unholy Choirs demand her presence, my lord!  _ PLEASE! _ ”

Terror and fury were closer bedfellows in this form as well. He barely heard the children cry out as he threw the imp into a nearby statue in a rage, breaking the ugly little thing’s back. Below him, Robin flinched, but her hold on the fabric of his pants stayed clenched there, iron-tight.

“ ** _Hunt them at your peril_ ** !!” he screamed, his demonic vocal cords making it carry across his father’s lands, almost a spell as he made his proclamation. “ ** _And tempt your demise_ ** !!”

He knew they’d be fleeing back to their masters, telling every ruler of the Hellplanes, every lord of the Unholy Hosts, that Asmodai’s heir, Prince Stephanos, had refused the Old One’s demands.

Some would naturally view this as proof that Steve was no real demon, too soft to be one of them, and some would admire the young prince’s guts in throwing the demands of the Old Gods back in His face.

_ Father won’t be pleased _ , he thought miserably, before another thought occurred.  _ I’m dying next week. It won’t matter, if it ever mattered at all _ .

Without the stench of the imp-packs, Steve could smell fresh human blood and his eyes darted downward, startled to find that while Robin was chalky and paper-white in the face, she looked mostly uninjured, apart from a few bites and scratches. 

“Steve!” Dustin pleaded.

Whirling around, most of the children, apart from Dustin himself, scrambled back as the creature who vaguely resembled their favorite babysitter turned its hellfire gaze toward them. This was very different from what they had seen in the Wheeler’s kitchen – it appeared that Billy had only given them a glimpse at Steve’s darker nature. 

Steam billowed out from his mouth in the cold air at every exhale and his enormous black wings mantled furiously every few moments. Dull black horns flowed back from just behind his temples, stark against the warm chestnut highlights in his trademark fluffy hair. His speech –  _ was that what demon language sounded like _ ? – was not just a mere sound, but something they could all feel, grinding down in their bones. Even the few English words he’d managed ( _ you  _ ** _will_ ** _ be, vermin _ ) hadn’t really sounded like their Steve and sent shivers of primal fear up their spines.

Billy held another gibbering imp in a ball of shielding energy in front of him, chanting a banishment spell at a speed that was genuinely quite impressive. Beside him, Eleven was on the ground and sobbing, clutching her bloody arm. She gasped a little as their eyes met. Like Billy’s eyes, she could see a place beyond the earth she knew within them.  _ Unlike _ Billy, it was definitely  **not** heaven that she saw there.

His pupils were entirely gone. Instead, she saw the glow of flames, bright and flickering, creeping black shadows, and a faint haziness swirling between them, like curls of smoke. The fires of hell. A soft cry left her, a tear spilling down over El’s cheek as the fear of it filled her whole self. She could nearly feel the heat upon her skin as he stared at her. The main set of his fangs, where a human’s upper canines would normally be, were so large that even when his mouth was closed, they were still visible hanging over his lower lip.

_ They don’t let demons go to heaven, love _ . It was only that memory of who her friend used to be that allowed her stay standing still as he approached her. 

“Oh, my poor girl,” the demon sighed, and El watched his tongue flicker out from between the rows and rows of his teeth. It was forked, like a serpent’s, and the same dull black as his horns. “Eleven...let me see it, baby.”

The voice was still wrong, but the cadence and rhythm of it was so familiar, so  _ Steve _ that El held out her arm on autopilot, a gory trail of blood slowly sliding down her hand from where the leathery ugly little goblin-man thing had sunk its teeth into her. 

Wordlessly, the demon man crooned in sympathy and the cooing sound shook her teeth with the grinding resonance of his voice. 

“Let’s see what we can do here.” And then demon-Steve started licking her. 

Lucas gasped “What the fu-”

El squirmed around uncomfortably at the tingling that spread through her arm wherever his saliva touched her bare skin. Curiously, Steve’s nose began to wrinkle as he licked up her blood, as though it had an unpleasant taste. (Not unpleasant, just...immature. Watered-down. Softly floral and creamy. Like a cup of weak Earl Grey. The sort of thing that wouldn’t be to his taste, even when she was grown up, but this was an emergency, after all.)

Robin blocked Billy the moment he attempted to intervene, still panting from his ordeal with the imp. “He’s-” 

“In control of himself,” she snapped. “He’s a person, whether you recognize him as one or not. Not a mindless animal - he doesn’t just go around mauling random strangers or-”

Robin broke herself off, looking hurt and furious and devastated. She sniffed hard, eyes glittering with unshed tears. Billy stared at her, stunned into silence. There was something somehow even more fucked up than Harrington being from the depths of hell going on here, because Buckley was not the type to get this emotional at inexplicable moments. 

“There, isn’t that better?” the Steve-demon purred at El, withdrawing his head to show that while her skin had mostly gone numb by now, the bite that used to be on her arm was nowhere to be found. Gently, he swiped at the tears on her cheek with a thumb, careful to keep all of his thick black claws away from her paper-thin skin. 

The huge black wings on either side of Steve’s shoulders fluttered, much more calmly now, and it wafted that familiar and comforting smell of Eggos and whipped cream around her. A smell which, from Billy’s reaction, she now understood to be as much a part of his demonic nature as Steve’s claws and fangs. 

Steve had to begin blinking his eyes rapidly as El leaned forward to hug him, trying to process what the fuck was going on. Finally, he draped one huge dark wing around her. “It’s alright, everything’s gonna be okay, El. They’re like really ugly, big, dumb talking dogs.”

“You scared the shit out of them,” Dustin said bluntly, then narrowed his eyes at Steve. Christ, he hated smart people sometimes. “And that last one - he called you ‘prince’.”

“Yeah,” Lucas agreed. “The big ugly talking dog called you a lord.”

“Because I  _ am _ a prince. I told you - my biological mom’s a human, but my dad is a demon. Asmodai, king of Gehenna, second lord of hell, leader of the seventy-two legions.” At their stricken expressions, Steve rolled his eyes. “It literally means nothing, guys. It’s just a title.”

“It means you’ll be a king of hell,” Billy said, brows arched.

“Demon bodies are immortal, remember?” Steve shot back. “It’s a title and nothing else - I’ve only got it because Lilit forced him into it. Like I said, it really doesn’t mean anything.”

\---

Time moves differently on each plane, and this was why Lilit collected so many clocks. She preferred to know when it was. But only one of these was truly important and it was the most ornate, a beautiful creation of gold and cherry hardwood enchanted with Lilit’s own magic. The long gold pendulum was engraved with trailing flower vines. The ebony face showed the phases of the moon inlaid in mother-on-pearl on the Hell-plane of Elysium, and each time its single golden-star hand reached the next phase, the clock played music rather than chiming, which Lilit found very charming.

For the first twelve years that she possessed that clock, every chime had been Tchaikovsky’s “March of the Toy Soldiers”. For the past fourteen, it has played “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies”.

Today for the first time, when the hand struck the new moon, the clocked sang “Waltz of the Flowers”. 

Abruptly, Lilit dismounted from the male vampire who’d been servicing her, folding her wings behind her with a sharp, rapid motion. “Hey, where are you going?!”

Anxiously, Lilit wandered stark naked to the receiving room where several people were waiting to speak to her, probably hoping that she could bend her brother’s ear. None of them looked disturbed by her nudity, though Agrat asked, mildly concerned, “Something the matter, Lilit? Sounds like you didn’t finish eating.”

“I’ve lost my appetite,” she said, gazing at the clock of Elysium with some dismay. 

Lilit the Well-Desired (if she liked you), or Lilit the Night Queen (if she didn’t) had always wanted to be a mother someday.

This was a somewhat unusual ambition in her species. Ubus were not naturally inclined toward parenthood – they tended to be temperamentally unsuited to forming long term relationships with demons of their own species as they could not feed from each other, and demons of other species tended to fear and mistrust them for the very nature of their existence. 

Cambion, though many of her brethren had created them, were considered… ‘inferior product’. Few chose to allow their half-breed children to live and most viewed that as a mercy. Apart from their fragility as compared to a full-bred Ubus, their society saw their existence as evidence of a childish lack of self-control. What self-respecting Incubus couldn’t stop themselves from planting their seed in a human? What Succubus would deign to carry a half-human in their body?

Lilit had considered it before, but had never really grown so fond of any human that she would preserve his essence within her. Asmodai had multiple hidden indiscretions over thousands of years, only revealing them to her after the fact, after he’d taken steps to make sure the Cambion would not live.

Until Stephanos. 

She had found him first, and the moment Lilit gazed upon him, she loved him and knew that he was meant to be hers. Asmodai may have provided the substance from which he was formed, but Stephanos was her own. He was king of her heart, and it was why she named him Stephanos. The humans had butchered it so much that they believed it to mean ‘crown’, but Lilit knew it was so much more – it meant ‘all-encompassing’, and he may not have been the whole world, but he was  _ her _ whole world.

Lilit bullied Asmodai until he named Stephanos his crown prince, though they both knew he’d never live long enough to sit even an hour upon the throne, if only so that Lilit herself would not be viewed as an embarrassment to him, nursing the half-breed in front of Lucifer and everyone on bottles filled with a mixture of goat’s milk and her own demonic blood.

She never would’ve believed that she could love anything as much as she loved him. It was in the Ubus nature to become bored with things and people very quickly – it prevented them from overfeeding on a single source and killing their meals by accident. But the more Stephanos grew, the more Lilit loved him. 

And the more she loved him, the more Lilit understood that she would never have a child of her own, would never nurse another Cambion with a bottle of goat’s milk and demon blood. She didn’t have the strength, she realized, staring into the face of her exquisite clock. She didn’t have the strength to love like this again. Because Lilit knew that it was a love only destined to break her heart.

Every Cambion was born in the lush blooming fields of Elysium, transported there at the moment they came into existence under the bright glow of the enormous moon. And from the moment of that birth, their life began rapidly ticking away from them. The demon and the human struggled against each other, the demon soul burning feverishly within their delicate human body.

For the Ubus, lifespan meant nothing. They lived forever and died when they died, because demonic souls did not live beyond their bodies. But a Cambion’s lifespan was short even by human standards, most perishing before reaching thirty years on Earth. When the Cambion’s life had reached one-hundred-and-one of those Elysian moons, that delicate human body would no longer be able to hold the chaotic energy of their demon soul. In Earth’s time, this was generally between twenty-five and twenty-eight years, depending upon where the moon’s cycle in Elysium had been at the time of their birth.

Even to a human, that was so fleetingly short - to an Ubus like her, it was nearly nothing. So ephemeral, it was nearly meaningless. But not to her. Not to the heart which would spend the next millennium grieving it.

Her faithful clock had just announced that her nephew’s time was coming to an end and that this would be the last Elysian moon of his life. Stephanos would starve to death, his human body no longer able to contend with the increasing demands of his demonic appetite. 

His beautiful soul would return to Elysium, blooming into one of the breathtaking flowers that claimed the entire plane there, forever perfect and unharmed in that perpetual night. But Lilit had no concept of life after death. The thought that her dear boy’s soul would be safe and preserved for all eternity held no comfort for her, and she suspected that it held little comfort for his sweet human girl, Robin, either. Oh, how the poor child had cried when Stephanos told her! 

“Lilit, where are you going?!” Agrat cried.

“Tell my brother I have gone out!”

They all stood frozen in their tracks, startled with mouths agape as a Ruler’s voice roared out, shaking through the eyries and spires of Gehenna with its force. “ ** _HEAR ME VERMIN_ ** !” the Lord bellowed furiously. “ ** _YOU TOUCH NO HUMAN OF MINE_ ** !!”

“That...was not Lord Asmodai,” Agrat said, almost a question, her eyes still enormous and rounded.

“ ** _Hunt them at your peril_ ** !!” her nephew screamed. “ ** _And tempt your demise_ ** !!”

“No,” Lilit said, with quiet pride, the urge to roar herself nearly overcoming her. “That was Stephanos.” 

\--- 

“I thought you said we had to be quiet!” Mike complained, as they went stomping their way back through the eerily empty and silent mansion.

“It’s a bit too late for that,” Max scoffed. “Steve just screamed his head off and Billy did half a dozen different spells.”

Steve hummed in agreement. 

Softly, Robin said, “_Steve_.”

He turned to listen, hellfire eyes meeting hers. Like Eleven, she felt the flames licking her skin when she saw them, but she couldn’t find it in herself to feel fear. “Yeah?”

“You’re looking…”

Billy was getting the kids into the cars, as fast as humanly possible. Quickly, his gaze darted toward a nearby mirror, groaning in dread at what he saw looking back at himself. “Oh, no…”

Though he’d fed on Robin earlier that morning, and El less than half an hour ago before he could calm the Party down and convince them to go on, Steve’s face was now thinner, nearly gaunt.

“You need to eat something, and soon.”

Their eyes met in the mirror. He murmured, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, Robbie.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said thickly, trying and failing to sound annoyed. “If you apologize, it’s like you’re already gone.” 

“Okay,” he said softly. “Then I’m not sorry. I love you, instead. Is that better?”

Silently, she allowed a single sob against his shoulder. “Shut up.”

**Author's Note:**

> This entire story is basically the description of any Ghost album, but for those of you who like an actual soundtrack, these are the Ghost songs that were really on my mind: Cirice, Dance Macabre, I Believe, If You Have Ghosts, Kiss the Go-Goat, Mary on a Cross, and Year Zero


End file.
